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DRAMA
direct challenge to received opinion characteristic of Euripides have boiled
away in the decoction.
The rhetorical aspects of tragedy were popular, and, as the second century
progressed, increasingly prominent. There had always been divergent tendencies
in Latin eloquence. The one was laconic and compressed, and derived from
the nature of the language: a single word, a verb, may express a quite complicated
sentence; a major part of the nouns and adjectives in Latin are formed
from verbal stems; and words may readily be 'understood'. Different facets
of this tendency may be seen, for example, in some epitaphs and elogia of the
second century, in Cato's speeches and De agri cultura, and in Terence's plays
(not his prologues). The other tendency was towards elaboration, a fullness
and decoration effected by alliteration, anaphora, assonance, antithesis, and the
like. This may be seen in the epitaphs of the Scipios, the fragments of some of
the annalists such as Coelius Antipater, and in the prologues (not the plays) of
Terence, as well as in the 'full-blooded' style of Plautus and, above all, in
tragic diction. Very roughly, these inherent tendencies correspond to the
divergences between the 'Attic' and the 'Asiatic' schools of Greek rhetoric.
In the two generations following the Second Punic War the relations of Rome
and Pergamum were close, and the leading exponent of the Asiatic style of
oratory was the head of the school there, Crates of Mallos. He visited Rome
and lectured there on rhetoric while recovering from an accident in 167 B.C.;
Terence's prologues, written over the immediately following years, are striking
proof of the popularity of this style, which for us is perhaps most familiar in
the Epistles of St Paul, himself an 'Asiatic' writer. The Romans discovered,
as it were, in the theories and systems and patterns of Greek rhetoric, particularly
Asiatic, that they had been speaking prose all the while; the strained
antitheses and the almost painfully correct partitioning of Terence's prologues
reflect a popular taste for euphuistic excess in judicial rhetoric. This did not go
unchallenged. Cato's famous remark rem tene> uerba sequentur 'hold to the
subject, the words will follow' was directed against this artificiality, and the
satirist Lucilius in the 120s B.C. scoffed not only at the contortions of Pacuvian
exordia {ROL (29) 879) but also at the 'tessellation' {ROL (2) 84-6) and
'childishness' {ROL (5) 186-93) of the Pergamene style.
Accius visited 'Asia', i.e. Pergamum, in the 130s B.C, and he was an adherent
of that school both in rhetoric and in scholarship. When asked why he did not
plead cases in court, Accius is said to have replied that whereas he (not his
Greek author!) controlled what his characters might say, he could not control
what an opponent might (Quint. Inst. 5.13.43). The story is bien trouvi: Accius
was of the same age and social class as Afranius, the writer of togatae, who did
plead cases (Cic. Brut. 167).
For all its extreme elaboration, the grand manner of tragedy was directly
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